I'm a multiple-time entrepreneur, living and working in the heart of Silicon Valley for the past quarter century. Currently, I spend most of my time working on a new startup in the online education arena. I've got a BA in political science and an MBA from Stanford. Having been around technology and business on the leading edge, I write mostly about what's new and what's coming for companies and the country. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ You can e-mail me at forbes_at_rogodotnet

A Guide To Fixing The Latest Privacy Attacks From Facebook And Google

Surely, the fact that GoogleGoogle and FacebookFacebook both chose this week to again erode your privacy had to be coincidental. But Thursday, Facebook was out with a small change that affects millions of users who tried to make themselves a bit harder to find and Friday, Google followed with a plan to put your recommendations and photos in the center of advertisements. The former may not have affected you, but serves as a reminder to go through Facebook’s still byzantine privacy settings to make sure strangers see your page as you want them too. Whereas in Google’s case, it’s easy to opt out, but it’s important to understand that the move signals an end to what might be looked at as the benevolent era of Google+. The following will step you through what happened, why it was done, and how to adjust your settings to deal with it.

Facebook

What was done: Facebook had made it possible for users to “hide” themselves from search results such that if you typed a name in the search box, it might come back empty even if the person was on Facebook. That didn’t mean the profile was hidden completely. You could still get to to by clicking their name in a photo tag or a status update or even by knowing the URL. (For example, my page is: https://www.facebook.com/markrogo) It is no longer possible to remove yourself from search results. As Kashmir Hill’s post on the topic explains, unless you explicitly block someone from seeing your Timeline, you will show up in search results.

Why?: Facebook wants you to be found. It has more than 1 billion users and is a de facto directory of the world’s internet users. With the rollout of Graph Search complete, it is trying to make search better and having it not return Facebook users makes no sense. It claims only a few percent of users were taking advantage of this feature, but that still means tens of million of people were availing themselves of it.

The fix: You can’t stay invisible, but you can make sure your Timeline — the thing that people find when they look for you — is appropriately locked down. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy because Facebook still has a lot of privacy settings. The instructions here assume that you want Friends to see your Facebook activity but not strangers and that you’ll continue to post new updates that are designed only for Friends. (On my page, I post Public updates for people who Follow me; most people don’t need or want to do that.)

If you click the gear icon in the upper right of your screen and choose Privacy Settings, you can see the most important stuff you will want to tweak. In “Who can see my stuff?” that third option might need some adjusting, but we won’t know until you take a look at your timeline, so hold off on that. First, you will want to limit your future posts to Friends if they aren’t already. The middle area, “Who can contact me?” controls where messages and friend requests go. For those that don’t want many more friends, you can limit requests to Friends of Friends. And if you are getting spam messages, you can use Strict Filtering, but generally those messages are already disappearing into the Other area and are ignored. The final two settings are quite important. Some people will use this an impetus to remember that Facebook might have a phone number for them and choose to remove it. That’s under the Mobile tab. The very last setting keeps Google, Bing and others from linking to your timeline. Some people will want to be found this way; most will prefer not to.

The next area you’ll want to focus on is the Timeline and Tagging. I’m a big fan of my Friends so I give them access to most functions. You’ll probably want to do the same, but keep others away from you timeline. There are two functions Facebook offers that give you more control over your Timeline, but you can see I leave them Off. Why? They require maintenance on the user’s part. I use Facebook mostly to enjoy my friends. I don’t want it to be work. Recommendation is to duplicate this screen as I’ve set it, but if you are really sensitive about what goes on your timeline, go ahead and turn the setting On for “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline?”

Now, back to what I said before. See that “View As” in the middle section? If you click it, you can get a look at how the world sees your Timeline. You’ll get a page that is the Public view (you can also adjust it to be the Friends view). If you don’t like what shows up, go back to the Privacy tab and choose Limit Past Posts. You can then take all your old Timeline posts and reset them to Friends only. It’s a one-way process and you can’t undo it so be careful.

Three final things about Facebook and privacy to remember (1) Apps are insidious, so be careful. The settings here under (Apps on the left) let you revoke permission from apps that seem to be doing things you don’t like. Don’t be afraid to go in there and take away those privileges from apps you don’t use anymore. You can muck up certain things, but usually you’ll get a warning. And more often than not, if an app really needs your permission, it’ll ask you to set it up again the next time you use it. Some games store your progress on Facebook (like Candy Crush) so they have perfectly legitimate reasons to hang around but less legitimate reasons to constantly want to talk to your friends.

(2) Photos can easily be shared publicly, especially from your smartphone, if you aren’t careful. Apple'sApple's built in photo sharing now seems to be default to sharing with Friends, but I’m not sure that was always the case. Facebook’s Camera app, however, seems to default to sharing you Public unless to explicitly tell it not to each time you share a picture. For that reason, you might want to just use Apple’s camera app to share photos to Facebook . (On Android, incidentally, the default sharing setting for photos is to Public on Google+, at least with stock Android on my Nexus 7.)

(3) There’s a tab on the left for Ads, which you can use to shut off social ad functions by choosing “Only Me” in both sections. One of the two is not currently in use, the other influences some existing Facebook ads in a way that resembles what Google is about to do. If you want to keep ads from being social, the time to deal with that is now.

Google

What was done: Google will start next month sharing all your recommendations with everyone it thinks you know on Google+. This means anything you rate on Google Play, any ads you give a “+1″ to, or anything you rate like a local restaurant. It calls these shared endorsements. It will be able to use your name and your Google+ profile picture alongside an ad for something that acknowledges basically you’re a fan. So if Frankie’s Pizza is running a Google ad, it might also say, “Mark Rogowsky +1′d this” and include my photo if you follow me on Google+.

Why?: Google knows that word of mouth is powerful. If an advertiser can claim, truthfully, that someone you know is already using their product and has given it their approval, that’s good for business. Facebook and Twitter have similar functionality, though there are no photos associated with it on Twitter and Facebook had some serious issues with ads using user’s photos. Google thus far hasn’t announced any plans to make ads like this, but it’s giving itself the ability to do so.

The fix: Google, to its credit, makes it completely trivial to opt out of this. Click this link, and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You’ll see this:

In fairness to both Facebook and Google, there is utility in ads that are more relevant rather than more random and both provide free products that rely on advertising to pay the bills. But that doesn’t mean you need to give up all rights to privacy to use them. The double whammy this week was a reminder that there is a lot of control over your profile and what gets shared with advertisers and the world. But the control is only useful if you take advantage of it.

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